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Some parents may feel the pressure to start their children’s schooling at a younger age to help them succeed academically, but a Stanford study suggests that starting formal education at an older age may be more beneficial for children.

The study, co-authored by Stanford Graduate School of Education Professor Thomas Dee, found that “children who started kindergarten a year later showed significantly lower levels of inattention and hyperactivity, which are jointly considered a key indicator of self regulation. The beneficial result was found to persist even at age 11.

The findings, published earlier this fall in the National Bureau of Economic Research, provide "robust evidence," the researchers said, "that partnerships between ICE and local law-enforcement agencies led to substantial reductions in Hispanic student enrollment."

"I was surprised by the magnitude, especially when we mapped it to the preexisting population of Hispanic students," says Thomas Dee, professor at Stanford and lead author of the paper. "Now we're understandably paying so much attention to immigration enforcement at the border, but this type of enforcement is really consequential as well."

It has been estimated by Stanford professor Sean Reardon that between 4 percent and 5.5 percent of students begin school a year late. Research has largely shown that the effects of redshirting on academics are positive, with older students likely to score higher on standardized tests than their younger classmates. One recent study by Northwestern University’s David Figlio indicated that later school entry was associated with higher rates of college attendance and graduation, as well as a lower likelihood of incarceration.

The report indicated that there is a persistent economic and racial achievement gap in California that well surpasses the national average. While students in affluent areas in California match the average performance of students in affluent areas nationwide, students in low-income California districts are scoring an average of a full grade level behind low-income students in other states.

“We’re not failing our rich kids,” said Sean Reardon, professor at the GSE and researcher in the study. “We’re not, as a state, providing as much educational opportunity for our low- and middle-income communities and kids.”

About a third of the 25 districts with the widest achievement disparities between white and black students are in or near college towns, according to a review of data compiled by researchers at Stanford University. Affluent families in university towns invest a large proportion of their resources in their children’s education, said Sean Reardon, a professor of education at Stanford.

An important new study — from Thomas Dee, a Stanford professor, and Mark Murphy, a graduate student there — solves the mystery. Dee and Murphy have uncovered a mass displacement of American children that had previously gone overlooked.

Stanford University endowed Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education joins Research Minutes to talk about his study Recent Trends in Income, Racial, and Ethnic School Readiness Gaps at Kindergarten Entry with CPRE –UPenn researcher, Ryan Fink. Reardon's study was recently published in American Educational Research Association's OPEN journal. Reardon analyzes school readiness trends through lenses of several demographic differences and factors.

Important recent work by Reardon and his collaborators shows that not only test scores but also racial test score gaps vary dramatically across American school districts. In this latter paper, Reardon and coauthors report that while racial/ethnic test score gaps average around 0.6 standard deviations across all school districts, in some districts the gaps are almost nonexistent while in others they exceed 1.2 standard deviations.

The researchers, including Richard Murnane of Harvard and Sean Reardon of Stanford, studied private school enrollment trends between 1968 and 2013. They estimate the proportion of students enrolled… at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles of the income distribution, which they refer to as low-, middle-, and high-income.

As more schools consider sending text messages to parents to encourage behaviors that support their child's education, a new research paper finds that it's possible to overdo it when it comes to effectively communicating through texts.

For the past half century, roughly one in 10 U.S. families has chosen to enroll their children in private school. The reasons behind these decisions are as individual as families themselves: some may perceive the quality of education to be better at a private school than their neighborhood school, some may wish to continue a family tradition or be motivated by religious beliefs, and others may seek specialized programs for a child with a particular interest or learning challenge.

Do student teachers learn more when they’re mentored by especially effective teachers?

Three studies released this year offer real evidence that good teaching can be passed down, in a sense, from mentor teacher to student teacher. In several cases, they find that the performance of the student teachers once they have their own full-time classrooms corresponds to the quality of the teacher they trained under.

Eric Hanushek, a Stanford professor of economics who studies education, points out that among all the countless reforms tried over the years—smaller schools, smaller class sizes, beautiful new buildings—the one that correlates most reliably with good student outcomes is the presence of good teachers and principals who stick around. When Willie Brown opened, some teachers were making around $43,000 a year, which works out to about the same per month as the city’s average rent of about $3,400 for a one-­bedroom apartment. After a decade of service, a teacher can now earn about $77,000 a year, and that’s under a union contract. (By comparison, a midcareer teacher who moves 40 miles south, to the Mountain View Los Altos District, can make around $120,000 a year.)